Site Mobile Navigation

For the Pennsylvania Dutch, a Long Tradition Fades

Eric A. Claypoole, who makes a living selling the signs to tourists, at his studio in Lenhartsvlle, Pa.Credit
Mike Mergen for The New York Times

LENHARTSVILLE, Pa., July 15 — Eric A. Claypoole chases ghosts, and when he catches them he paints them into life.

“It’s how we take back tradition,” Mr. Claypoole said, recounting with boyish glee the one he spotted on the side of a barn a couple of years back that turned out to be among the oldest in the country.

Ghosts are what people around here call the fading hex signs that the Pennsylvania Dutch began painting on their barns more than two centuries ago.

For years, the signs have been abandoned to weather and time. But though their brightly colored stars, framed with ornate rosettes and images of tulips, have paled, the ghosts have lingered as the shadows of a vanishing local tradition. The oldest are but stains on cracked wood panels. Others, just barely visible, stare quietly from behind coats of cheap white paint.

“I used to think a barn was a barn; now I drive around and see these symbols everywhere,” said Mr. Claypoole, who, in addition to restoring hex signs on barns, makes most of his living by painting them on pieces of wood that he sells to tourists.

Experts counted more than 800 of the signs on barns in the 1980’s; fewer than 200 remain. The barn stars are disappearing ever more rapidly as old wooden barns themselves disappear, replaced by cheaper metal ones. Another factor in their decline was the $300 or so it cost farmers to keep them repainted.

Usually about four feet in circumference, the signs were painted in bright hues on barns’ gable sides, especially along Old Route 22, or the Hex Highway, a quiet, winding road just off Interstate 78.

They were brought here by the Germans who came from the Rhineland-Palatinate area to these fertile valleys in southern Pennsylvania, a region rich in mystery — and mistranslation. Though the people in these parts are of German descent, they are called the Pennsylvania Dutch because the dialect that most of them once spoke, a mix of German and English, was referred to as Pennsylvania Deutsch.

And while the power to ward off evil and bring good luck or plentiful harvests has been attributed to the hex signs, most scholars now believe that this notion too sprang from linguistic error. In Wallace Nutting’s 1924 book “Pennsylvania Beautiful,” the author most likely confused the Pennsylvania German word for six-pointed, “sechsafoos,” with the word for witch’s foot, “hexefuss.”

Photo

Hex signs on barns in Pennsylvania Dutch country are waning, many abandoned long ago to time and weather, and now grown pale.Credit
Mike Mergen for The New York Times

The real origin of the tradition was purely artistic, said David Fooks, executive director of the nearby Kutztown Folk Festival.

“The barn was the most important place in the farm family’s life,” Mr. Fooks said, “and it was only natural for them to decorate it.”

The meaning of the signs’ symbols is also a source of debate, as is the lineage. Mr. Claypoole said that according to his father, Johnny Claypoole, who painted the signs on barns from 1962 until he died two years ago, barn-star colors like yellow and green have for ages symbolized fertility. A circle symbolizes unity, while an oak leaf means strength.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

Mr. Claypoole also recalled that an elderly Pennsylvania Dutch woman had recently told him that all barn stars had forever had a biblical meaning. The points or petals of a 12-pointed star, she said, signify the Twelve Apostles, while the red dot in a star’s center symbolizes Christ’s blood.

But Mr. Fooks disagrees. He said the meanings were actually made up in the 1950’s by a barn-star artist named Johnny Ott, who, being constantly asked about the designs, began vesting them with associations of his own. “He was a savvy marketer,” Mr. Fooks said.

Though there are few painters with the same specialty, Mr. Claypoole is not alone in his efforts to deal with the region’s ghosts. In 2002, the Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center at Kutztown University established an endowment to pay farmers to restore their signs; the endowment picks up half the cost.

The signs are a big part of what draws more than 100,000 people to the Kutztown Folk Festival each July. The festival offers a taste of what early Pennsylvania German life was like, including a sampling of roasted ox and lessons in the fading musical art of playing the spoons. Hex signs are painted on virtually every booth.

Whatever the true history and meaning of the signs, no one likes their disappearance. Restoring them “costs money, but we thought it was worth it,” said Peter Snyder, a carpenter who hired Mr. Claypoole to repaint one on his barn.

A ghost with the same patterns remains on the other end of Mr. Snyder’s barn, but just barely clinging to this world.

“I know that one is there too, and it’s time we dealt with it,” Mr. Snyder said, staring up at it pensively.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: For the Pennsylvania Dutch, A Long Tradition Fades. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe